The Marrakech Embers

My name is Audrey Herrick, and I send people to the ends of the earth for a living. Most of them come home with a tan. A few of them come home with their entire life quietly rearranged. This is the story of the one I sent to Marrakech, and the names have been changed, because my lawyer was very firm about it.

Dara Nassiri is forty years old, the most gifted designer her firm has, and an absolute master of one thing in particular: making "global influences" look extremely expensive. So when a luxury house sends her to Morocco to find the soul of its new flagship, she expects to charm a few craftsmen, photograph some beautiful tile, and fly home with an award.

She does not expect Youssef El Amrani.

He runs the riad where she is staying. He is infuriatingly calm, professionally unimpressed, and the gatekeeper to every master artisan she needs, and he has exactly zero interest in helping one more designer fly in, take what these hands spent six hundred years learning to make, and leave their names off it. He pours her tea she did not ask for. He out-waits her at every turn. He informs her, kindly, that she should try to be more like the zellige.

Dara has three weeks, a deadline, a daughter waiting at home, and a competition that could remake her career, if she is willing to flatten everything true about the work in order to win it.

What she did not budget for was a man who reads the world the way she reads a room, a city that keeps handing back pieces of a self she thought she had left behind, and one question she cannot put down: what is the difference between loving a beautiful thing and actually being brave enough to pay for it?

From the heat and noise of the Marrakech souks to a wood-fired kiln in Fez where a single turning wind can make or unmake a year of work, THE MARRAKECH EMBERS is a witty, sweeping, deeply romantic novel about craft, courage, second chances, and the terrifying business of wanting something out loud.

Escape to Morocco. Stay for the slow burn.